John Shepard's FM Stations—America's first FM network

Some aspects of radio history are open to debate, and may
always be—was KDKA really the first station, or was it WWJ,
or perhaps even my favourite, 1XE/WGI? But in the matter of early
FM, this much is generally agreed upon: we owe its development in
New England to two men—the inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong,
and the business executive who believed in and supported his
work—John Shepard 3rd. When
Armstrong's former friend and colleague David Sarnoff turned away
from a commitment to FM, it was Shepard who offered encouragement.
Always quick to spot a trend, Shepard believed that FM could be
beneficial and profitable; many station owners were threatened by
FM, fearing it would hurt their AM operations, but Shepard had no
hesitation in befriending Armstrong and investing in FM. Shepard
put the power and prestige of the Yankee Network at Armstrong's
disposal and planned to bring FM broadcasting to greater
Boston.

In the spring of 1937, Shepard applied for a permit for a 50-kW
FM station in Paxton. In an article he wrote for FM
Magazine in March of 1941, Yankee Engineering Vice
President Paul DeMars recalled that the plan was initially beset
with problems: “Delays in obtaining a suitable site... held
up construction for over a year, but in October of 1938, work was
begun... When this project was planned, no 50-kW equipment had
been built for the frequencies assigned to FM experimentation.
Furthermore, no antenna system had been designed or constructed
with radiating efficiency high enough to insure the desired
performance.” Undaunted, the construction team built a road
through what had been woods and pastures, to the top of
Asnebumskit Hill, and embarked on erecting what would become
W1XOJ, the first FM station in Massachusetts. As DeMars mentioned
in his article, since 50-kW transmitters for FM were still being
perfected, the new station did not go on with full power—its
first broadcasts were at about 2 kW. (The Paxton site is still
used for FM broadcasts, by an indirect descendant of that station,
now WAAF. When the Worcester Telegram & Gazette
decided to build their own FM station, W1XTG, they chose adjacent
Little Asnebumskit Hill; that station is now WSRS and is still in
the original location.)

The Boston media tried to explain what was going on, since the
average person might be confused by so many new developments. The
Boston Post noted in a May, 1939 article that within
weeks, New England would hear “a radically new and different
broadcasting service that may prove to be revolutionary... the new
system not only requires a new type of transmitter but it also
requires a new type of radio receiver. Transmission will not be
in the regular broadcast band but on ultra high-frequency, 43
megacycles or seven metres approximately.” The Post informed
its readers that W1XOJ would have its transmitter “on top of
a hill whose summit is 1375 feet above sea level. The antenna
mast is 400 feet high and supports a special array called a
‘turnstile”. The purpose of this array is to direct
the radiation toward the horizon and to suppress skyward
radiation”. Unfortunately, buried in the glowing reports of
the near completion of the Paxton site was the news that the
Yankee Network programming Shepard wanted to broadcast from Boston
was not able to reach Paxton; thus, a relay station (called at
first W1XOK, then WEOD) was built; it had 250 Watts, and was
located at the Yankee Network studios on Brookline Avenue.

What the Boston media did not mention was that WBZ was not
amused. Westinghouse and Shepard had long been in competition for
advertising dollars. Now, the Westinghouse engineers felt they
were being upstaged by Shepard's ability to get his name (and the
names of all his engineers) in print as innovators in FM. I have
copies of several letters sent back and forth between WBZ's chief
engineer and Shepard's, with claims and counter-claims. WBZ
wanted to enter into the FM area too, but clearly, Shepard was
scoring a major publicity coup, and the Boston newspapers were
giving him lots of ink. (In fairness, it should be pointed out
that for a time during the early 1930's, during the
‘Press-Radio War’, the print media had been Shepard's
bitter enemies; but the sudden arrival of a new and exciting
technology plus the fact that Shepard was instant copy, always
ready with an event or a quote, made even former rivals follow him
around to see what FM could really do.)

Prior to W1XOJ's first broadcast, Shepard—in conjunction
with the Institute of Radio Engineers—scheduled a
demonstration of FM, to which he invited his competitors from
other stations. The demonstration, which took place on May 26,
1939 at Northeastern University, was also attended by several
hundred college professors, engineers, scientists, and
technicians, as well as one very annoyed chief engineer from WBZ.
In a letter to the home office several days after, WBZ Plant
Manager Dwight Myer called the event basically a waste of time and
claimed to be totally unimpressed. He closed his letter with
these comments: “It is not frequency modulation itself that
I am belittling but the meeting. The talks were non-technical,
and in my opinion, it was engineered as a mutual publicity stunt
for John Shepard and Major Armstrong.”

Publicity stunt or not, the Boston media expressed great
enthusiasm. The Post that Sunday headlined
“Engineers Hail Noiseless Radio” and went on to
describe how the audience listened with amazement to a variety of
source material, all of which came through with incredible
clarity. In the talk which Armstrong gave before the
demonstration, he did in fact thank Shepard for his support, but
he also explained that it had been Paul DeMars who had first come
to believe in FM and who then persuaded Shepard to become
involved.

On July 24, 1939, W1XOJ began a schedule of 16 hours a day on
the air (8 AM to midnight). The power was soon boosted to 30 kW,
but then in mid-January of 1940, a violent ice storm did serious
damage to the transmitting antenna, and a temporary antenna was
called into service. It would take another year before Shepard's
dream of a 50-kW FM became a reality, on January 15, 1941. But
Shepard had another dream too—an FM network for New England.
There was a 500-watt Weather Service station (W1XOY) atop
Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, and he hoped to convert it into
his second FM. Broadcasting the Yankee Network programs just as
W1XOJ did, this new station would be capable of reaching a very
underserved area of Northern New England, an audience he estimated
at nearly a million people.

W1XER

And so it was, on December 18, 1940, that the next link in
Shepard's plan went on the air—it was now known as W1XER
(shown), and while it was supposed to eventually be 5 kW, it went
on the air with 1 kW. The engineering staff had been challenged by
the severity of Mt. Washington weather, and Paul DeMars stated in
another article for FM Magazine that at times he
wondered if the team would be able to overcome the inhospitable
atmosphere on the mountain: gale-force winds and monumental snow
drifts made working especially difficult. He worried most about
the new antenna—if one more antenna were to blow down, it
would be a financial disaster for the Yankee Network. The new
equipment for Paxton had cost $35,000, and converting the
Mt. Washington station to FM cost more than $50,000; in 1939-40,
these were not small sums.

The brutally cold temperatures and frequent high winds the
engineers encountered while building W1XER delayed the project,
such that it took three years to complete. At times, the
engineers were stranded at the site, with only the provisions they
had brought with them, until the bad weather diminished. One
wonders if Shepard had realised that the new station would be so
difficult for his engineers to build. They persevered, and their
efforts finally paid off—but it was not exactly a camping
trip. DeMars recalled, “During the last two months of the
construction and testing period at W1XER, it was necessary for the
Yankee engineers... to either ski or walk the eight miles of
mountain road to the Summit, because snow made the road impassible
even to a tractor. Some of the equipment was taken half way up
the mountain by ski-mobile... It was back-packed by men the
remainder of the way...”

As for John Shepard, he was busy selling—selling
potential advertisers on the possibilities of FM. (On May 26,
1941, the first commercials exclusively for FM were broadcast over
both stations—by now, these stations were known as W43B and
W39B. The commercials that ran were bought by the Socony-Vacuum
Oil Company, today's Mobil.) He was also selling the FCC on
permitting commercial FM broadcasts, and doing what he could to
persuade them to allocate more and better FM frequencies. He was
a tireless advocate for the new technology, and was quoted often
in publications such as the New York Times,
Broadcasting, and Variety, as well as
the Boston newspapers. He mobilised other station owners to see
FM's potential, and without neglecting his AM operation—he
simply expanded it, using FM to get the Yankee Network out to an
even larger audience. When in March of 1942 he opened a new
studio complex in Boston, he proudly showed the media an
impressive display of state of the art equipment in the six new
studios, several of which were exclusively for FM broadcasts.

It is difficult to say whether FM would have blossomed had not
World War II intervened. Armstrong was preoccupied with the war
effort, and many of the people involved in research were drafted.
But Shepard continued to broadcast FM and continued to persuade
other owners to give it a try. While today we take FM for
granted, it is interesting to recall that not so long ago, the
jury was still out: people agreed that the sound quality was
wonderful, but few realised that one day FM would become dominant
and AM would recede in importance. We who live in New England are
fortunate that we were on the cutting edge as FM grew; and no
discussion of those formative years is complete without giving
credit to John Shepard 3rd for his vision (and to his dedicated
staff of engineers for their persistence in the face of
overwhelming odds). While his detractors called him a publicity
hound and criticised how aggressively he pursued what he wanted,
it cannot be denied that in FM as in many other aspects of
broadcasting, John Shepard was truly a man ahead of his time.

Donna L. Halper is a media historian, author of five books and
many articles. She is an assistant professor of Communication at
Lesley University, Cambridge, Mass., and received her Ph.D. in
Communication from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst.